I’m wondering what the current favorite distros are besides the most popular ones like Arch, Debian and Fedora.
OpenSUSe. Tumbleweed as a rolling bistro is amazingly stable, yast is nice, and it all just works great. Leap for the servers, and things are solid.
I, too, get my coffee from the rolling bistro.
Loool I’ll leave it
Same. Tumbleweed here. All the benefits of the rpm ecosystem but with less hassle and more updates
OpenSUSE for me too.
I also switched family & friends to Thimbleweed (since a bit too snappy Ubuntu) & it’s been great.
I should think so too. A Thimbleweed sounds an excellent plant for an Evil_Shrubbery.
My evil plans have been discovered!!
Regardless the evil plant army must grow. Rolling thimbleweeds are usually our scouts and assassins (rarely kamikaze when on fire, looks cool tho).
What I’m saying is that you better be on the lookout, maybe hide if you see a thimbleweed with a gun or knife.
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OpenSUSE Tumbleweed has been my desktop home for the last year. It’s very up to date, yet it’s somehow solid and reliable despite sometimes receiving hundreds of updates per week. And if anything goes wrong with an update you can easily roll back to a BTRFS snapshot. It has a good repository supplemented by Flatpaks, and I haven’t had any problems finding software, yet it’s not a hassle like some other cutting-edge distros. It uses KDE Plasma by default, which I consider a plus. I came to it from Mint, which was my go-to distro for a long time, but I enjoy Tumbleweed more for its up-to-dateness and configurability, and I have (surprisingly) encountered more software gaps on Mint.
OpenSuse tumbleweed
NixOS for me. It’s a package manager (a very nice, declarative one) that you can use on any Linux (or Mac), and there’s also an entire distro based on it.
Yeah I’ve gotten into Nix recently and it’s slowly been taking everything over bit by bit. So now I have the standalone package manager when I’m on WSL or other distros, full NixOS on a couple machines, fully reproducible LXC containers for my Proxmox build, the list goes on and on! Hell, I’ve got it on my steam deck to manage my CLI apps just because I can lol
Gentoo. It’s amazingly customisable, easy to configure and write packages for, has an extraordinarily good wiki (and installation instructions), and is always seeing new and active development.
There is also official binary package support for architectures as of recently too, which makes it easy to mix and match compiling from source and binary packages.
+1 for Gentoo - Portage can be fun in a weird way. I’m more of a “just work” type of person though, so I’ve stuck to Arch, but the time I had with Gentoo was pretty great and the new binary package format might bring me back. I do have a 7950X nowadays so I wonder if that’d fly through Gentoo on bare metal.
Another vote for openSUSE Tumbleweed
I’m enjoying OpenSuse Tumbleweed loving rolling release and stability
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OpenSuse Tumbleweed without a doubt!
Alpine.
I’m a longtime Arch user, and would have preferred to use Arch on a particular system, but didn’t want to deal with needing to babysit ZFS packages from AUR.
So, I decided to use Alpine after never having tried it before, and ended up sticking with it. Like Arch, it’s both lightweight and has a capable/sensible package manager, which are the main things that are important to me.
I haven’t had any growing pains from Alpine’s use of busybox/musl/openrc, things mostly Just Work!
It will bite you after a while. I remember using alpine in a docker image many years ago and running a python program that needed some modules installed, where one of them required compiling c code. Naturally that didnt work on alpine since its using its own c library. So couldn’t run the python app at all on alpine.
I remember having all of these libseat and elogind errors when I tried to use anything wayland-related: Sway, Hyprland, even KDE. Since then I switched back to Arch because I felt like everything Just Worked™️ there
Came here to say the same thing
PopOS. Mostly because I’m really interested in their Rust based DE that’s to replace Gnome.
Yep, for me the most exciting moment in 2024 will be Cosmic being released and partly also the release of KDE 6, even though that probably won’t be a big deal. Just nice to use qt 6 I guess. It doesn’t have any new features really.
Can it still be a favourite if I haven’t touched it in a decade? I still love Gentoo but I have enough shiny things to burn up my time.
Same! I’m on Ubuntu and Pop these days but I fondly remember my old distcc build cluster…
Portage is still far and away my favorite package manager.
Hahaha same on the distcc cluster. It was a rare proud moment for me many years ago. I rememeber when I got the cross compiling working it felt like magic. Good times.
NixOS is not based on any other distro because it has its own package manager which is better than all the other distros’
Yes, that package manager will surely be the best one and not just be another one in the zoo.
The whole system is built using it, so every time your system will be the same when building from the same configuration. Even if you such to another computer, you will download locked versions of all packages and get the exact same system
In Ubuntu installing and removing a package doesn’t even guarantee it’s cleaned up
If we allow derivatives, I’d say SteamOS despite being Arch. It’s putting Linux in non-technical people’s literal hands and it’s not a locked down and completely different platform that happens to run Linux like Android is. It’s almost designed by Valve to give people a taste of Linux by the addition of its desktop mode, and people that would be modding consoles are now modding SteamOS and learning how much fun an open platform can be. I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Otherwise, NixOS, no contest. It’s been a really long time since we’ve last seen a fundamentally different distro that’s got some real potential. For the most part, Arch, Debian and Fedora do similar things with varying degrees of automation and preconfiguring your packages, but they’re still very package oriented. We’ve been mostly slapping tools like Ansible to really configure them to our liking reproducibly, answer files if your package manager has something like that. And then NixOS is like, what if the entire system was derived from evaluating a function, and and the same input will always result in the exact same system? It’s incredibly powerful especially when maintaining machines at scale. Updates are guaranteed to result in the exact same configuration, and they’re atomic too, no halfway updated system the user unplugged the system in the middle of.
I’ve seen people from sales talk about their Decks on my work Slack.
Read in an New Zealand accent this is classic Sales.
